BZRK Reloaded (22 page)

Burnofsky looked bad. He’d spent the night tied up and staring
longingly at the bottle of vodka. Jealously when he’d watched Nijinsky come and take a long pull.

Billy the Kid said nothing, because he had wanted to say, “I’m not
playing,” and then there had been this huge rush of memories and
it was like he’d swallowed poison or something. Like he wanted to
heave up his guts and he’d already done that.

Again, Billy was on the verge of saying something and stopped
himself. What he wanted to say was, “I’m not a murderer. I just
defended myself.”

Except that wasn’t quite true, was it? He had gotten out, after
all. He had then walked around the block and come back into the
bloody safe house.

He had been safe. Free and clear. And then he had gone back.
Of course he’d thought all the bad guys were dead. Right?
Right, Billy?
As if he could read Billy’s mind, Burnofsky laughed. It was a bitter, angry sound.

“Might as well,” Burnofsky said. “If you don’t, one of the others
will. Or more likely they’ll wire me.”
Billy noticed him glance at his suitcase. And Burnofsky noticed
the curiosity.
“Ever run a nanobot, kid? Ever twitched?”
Billy shook his head.
Burnofsky said nothing more, just waited, and glanced at the
suitcase again, and looked at Billy from half-closed eyes. Billy
reached impulsively for the suitcase. He unzipped it. There was a
clean shirt, underwear, a toiletries bag, and a zippered nylon case.
Billy glanced toward the stairwell. He hauled the zippered case
onto his lap, wedged his gun under his leg, and opened the case.
“Looks like an old Xbox. Kind of. The glove . . .” It was like
watching Burnofsky gaze lovingly at the bottle. Billy wanted to slip
the glove on.
“Go ahead. It tingles. It’s much more sensitive than anything
you’ve ever used before. You can set the tolerances, of course; at maximum, you barely need to move to twitch.”
Billy stalled, trying not to look greedy for the game. “Where are
the nanobots?”
“Where? Ah, well, we have two kinds, you know.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let’s call them the grays and the blues.”
“Okay.”
“The grays, well, they’re easy to move around, obviously. In fact,
the biggest worry is losing them. See the two batteries?”
Billy had of course seen them. They were nestled in an peppermints tin. Two very average-looking batteries, a single AAA and a
single AA.
Billy pulled the batteries out and cupped them in his hand. He
prodded them with his index finger. He frowned and then pinched
the protruding nub of the positive end of the AA and pulled. A cylinder slid out. Inside the cylinder were six glass tubes, each not much
thicker than a sewing needle.
“Each of those contains two dozen nanobots,” Burnofsky said.
Then he said, “Of course those are the grays.”
Billy heard the subtle disparagement in his voice. He looked up.
There was a challenging, teasing look in the old man’s eyes.
“What’s the big deal about the color?” BIlly asked.
“It’s not about the color,” Burnofsky said in a near-whisper that
forced Billy to lean in close. “It’s about capabilities. I mean, you’re a
gamer, right, Billy?”
Billy the Kid had come up along a mean path strewn with bad
people. He was not naïve despite being young. His instincts warned
him that Burnofsky was up to something.
But he could handle Burnofsky. He slid the glove onto his hand.
It seemed to come alive. It closed in around his hand, not squeezing
exactly, but forming itself to fit perfectly. Like it had been made to
order just for him.
He could feel thousands of tiny rubber needles pressing, tickling,
itching for him to twitch just a little.
He grabbed the second battery and pinched the nub with his free
hand. It was awkward now with the twitcher glove on. But he didn’t
want to take the glove off.
“How do I get them out?”
Burnofsky’s look was unreadable. Something deep and dark was
going on there. Something big. Finally he said, “You just snap the
glass pipette. See the one end the way it’s scored? Snap it off and just
upend it on any surface. The inside of the pipette is specially coated
so the nanobots can’t grip. They’ll slide right out. Takes about five
seconds.”
Billy held a single pipette up to the light. There was a suggestion
of faint blueness, nothing more.
“What’s better about these?” Billy asked.
“Well, Billy, those are special nanobots. Those are very special
nanobots.” Burnofsky’s voice was a whisper again. “Why don’t you
empty them out in your palm?”
Billy was past hesitation. Without needing to be told, he slipped
the goggles into place.
He snapped the pipette with his teeth, spit out the end, and held
it so the open end was against his ungloved palm.
Two dozen nanobots slid onto his hand.
The goggles lit up with screens. Twenty-four separate visuals. It
was a magnificent jumble of imagery. Mostly what he saw was nanobots—nanobots looking at nanobots—the whole tumbling melee of
spidery legs and spinning central wheels and seeking metallic eyes.
And he saw, for the first time, the world of the meat. The nanobots lay, stood, staggered around in what seemed like a deep ditch.
Like a ditch where leaves had fallen and collected on the ground without any trees nearby.
Crossing the ditch were smaller cuts in the “ground,” the smaller
lines of his palm. The ditch, wasn’t that what they called a lifeline or
something? Wasn’t there something about your lifeline, long or short?
Stupid, but it was weird being down there.
And the funny thing was that with the goggles on, it was almost
impossible to think of himself as anywhere other than down there.
That reality immediately took precedence over the macro world.
Burnofsky was all but forgotten.
Superimposed over the various visual fields was a menu, glowing
radioactive orange.
One choice was 1x1.
Another was Platoon.
Replay.
And one labeled SRN Rep.
Billy said, “One by one probably means play them individually.
Okay, and Platoon …” He twitched a finger, the button showed a
flare, and suddenly all twenty-four visual fields began to align, all
looking in the same direction like a well-disciplined army on parade.
There were secondary options—he could choose how many platoons
of what number. There were subroutines being suggested.
“What does SRN Rep”mean?” Billy asked.
“Ah,” Burnofsky said dreamily, “That’s the best part. It means
replicate. But I doubt you’re up for that.”
And here’s the thing: Billy knew Burnofsky was provoking him.
He knew the man wanted him to push SRN Rep.
He just didn’t know why. Billy the Kid, who was always being
underestimated, assumed the old dude wanted to see him humiliate
himself. Like he couldn’t handle whatever replicate meant.
He did not guess that the old man had just decided to obliterate
all life on the planet.
“Probably shouldn’t …,” Burnofsky said, letting it hang there.
Billy pressed SRN Rep.

To escape the Crystal City Hyatt was not easy. Bug Man was not
there alone. AmericaStrong security occupied the rooms on either
side. AmericaStrong agents regularly rotated in and out of the lobby,
keeping an unobtrusive but constant watch on who came and went.
Bug Man was a big asset to the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.

They had of course bugged his room. And he had, of course,
found those bugs, disabled all but one and looped that last bug into a
program that simply replayed audio from TV shows.

Jessica had dressed up and looked stunning. Bug Man …Well, he
had done what he could. He was never going to be George Clooney, or
who was that other dude all the girls liked?

“Let’s go see some sights,” Bug Man said. He took her hand. She
looked at his hand holding hers and frowned as if she was trying to
remember something.

“Things are going to be a bit strange,” he said. “For a while, at
least.”
“Strange?” She didn’t know what he meant, but she was unsettled.
Suddenly he felt doubt. He had almost convinced himself that
nothing would change. She would still adore him, but maybe be just a
bit less servile. A bit more honest.
Instead she was looking at him as if he presented a baffling mystery.
What am I doing with him?
“That’s okay, that’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” He was doing what
he hadn’t had to do since about three days into wiring Jessica: he was
placating.
And his nanobots were still inside her. If things got too weird . . .
He had long since planned a way to evade the watchful eyes of
the AmericaStrong watchdogs. He knew where the passage was to the
room-service elevators. It went down to the kitchen and beneath that
to the laundry.
Ten minutes later he was outside, holding Jessica’s hand, wishing
he had a warmer coat. It was a short walk to the Marriott, where they
could get a cab without being spotted.
Bug Man felt wild. Like a kid skipping out on school. He felt free.
Even the cold wind accentuated his sense of having escaped something. And if Jessica’s hand was a little less confident in his, well, that
was all right too, because he would win her over. He would make her
…no, scratch that …he would convince her to love him.
And the next time when she made love to him it would be real.

The monster …It was what she had to call them, no compassion
anymore, they were the monster! The monster had made her feel
awful things.

One minute she had been terrified and the next she had begun
laughing hysterically and the next she was crying, sobbing, tears running unchecked down the side of her face and into her ears.

The monster’s faces had laughed and sneered, and the smiling
one had congratulated the other one on discovering this wonderful
new game.

How many squares were formed by the wire mesh floor above
her? Count and multiply. One, two, three, four, five, six. She counted
to fifty, noted that the fifty-first square had a little smudge of green
paint; that would make it easier for her to go back if she lost count.

At some point they had reached her motor controls and had made
her right leg twitch painfully.
“Look! Look at that!” Charles had exulted.
“Hah!” Benjamin had said. “Do it again!”
So Minako had sat there spasming, her leg squeezing and relaxing, squeezing and relaxing, a human puppet.
“Imagine what else we could do,” Benjamin said in a voice that
made Minako’s flesh creep.
“Alas, we must return to the more important business of helping
this girl to let go of her fear. She is in need of our help, yes?”
Benjamin didn’t answer. But the wild jerking stopped, and a
while later the confused memories began to play out again.
There were one hundred and seventy-eight squares in the mesh
along the longer axis. Now to count to shorter axis. One, two, three
. . .
She had suddenly remembered her father, as a huge, moon-size
face looking down at her in her crib. There was a mobile of blue-andgold birds beside him. She had not understood his words. She didn’t
yet understand any words.
She had found herself scrubbing her hands in the bathroom
sink while her mother called to her to hurry up. In those days the
OCD had been all about hand washing. That symptom had lessened,
thankfully, but had been replaced by counting.
She saw disjointed, irrelevant visual memories—sand, a leaf, the
bars on her playpen, her best friend from fourth grade, Akiye.
She heard audio memories, like a corrupted download that
skipped from snatches of conversation to the sound of the wind
to a barking dog to something that scraped to something else that
pulsed.
A heart. Not hers, but so close. Her mother’s heart, as she had
heard it in her mother’s womb.
They were opening her up like a book and reading her. Not that
they understood, not that they saw in detail, for their comments were
more general.
“That seemed sad,” Benjamin would say, and his brother would
say, “Mine felt angry.”
They were leeches attached to her emotions, feeling what she felt
in some way that was both distant and intimate, like being groped by
someone wearing thick gloves.
And then—
“Gah.” said Benjamin. “The little pig has wet herself.”
She had felt the truth of it. She had wanted to start crying, but she
had never really stopped.
“Disgusting. I can’t go on, not until she’s cleaned up. KimKim
take her back to her lodge,” Charles had said.
“I need a rest anyway,” Benjamin agreed. “Min! I’ll have a cocktail. I’ve earned it, eh?”
KimKim had hauled Minako, shamed and defiled, back to the
lodge. “Take a shower. Change clothes,” he’d said harshly.
And now she lay counting the squares in the mesh and hoping
against hope that when she multiplied the two sides she would get a
lovely, beautiful number.

They danced.
Anthony Elder and Jessica …He had forgotten her last name.
How had he forgotten her last name?
They danced in a club where two hundred dollars and a plausible fake ID did the trick. There were advantages to being the AFGC
golden boy.
They danced on a parquet floor crowded with twentysomething
white guys in suits, their ties loosened and sweat matting their conservatively cut hair. They danced amid women in sexy-mannish
business suits who wore moderate, serious-lawyer heels and threw
their hair around a lot.
The music was pretty weak, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
They were dancing, a dude and his girl. His girl who blew away every
other female in the room.
That last part, the part about walking around with a stunning
beauty, he’d almost become used to that. The looks. From the guys,
from the women, the looks that said, Man, you are so not in that girl’s
league. But now it was different. He was still not in her league, but
now she was free, and every moment she spent with him . . .
“Having fun?” he yelled into her ear, straining to be heard over
the music.
“Uh-huh.”
“Really?”
He heard the insecurity in his own voice. He sounded needy.
Then she smiled, and it was a different smile. No one else would
notice, but he did. She was flushed with pleasure. Her eyes, her amazing eyes, were bright, and they watched him.
Gratitude. That’s what he felt. How strange. Gratitude. Like he
wanted to thank God up in heaven.
It was real. That was the thing: it was real.